Category Archives: food and drink

experiments and adventures of ingestibles

food and drink, opinion, Trivia

Quarantine bitchin’

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I haven’t been out ot the house since March 16.  I didn’t get out much before then, 2 maybe 3 times a week.

The wife is making grocery runs with mask and gloves,

I thought I was doing OK when the lockdown started,   I knew I wasn’t when I wanted to run out of the house and hug the lawn people when they showed. up.

I had been avoiding real news because I knew it was going to be depressing.  The only information I was getting was The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert.  The wife is following the news closely.  Guess which one of us has a better average mood.

My step-daughter has a job with an Austin distillery,  Most of the bars are closed so she’s spending a lot of time in liquor stores.  Our governor tried to open the bars to 50% capacity but COVID is spiking so there will probably be another lockdown.

I miss draft beer.  We are drinking a lot of Yellow Tail shiraz.  Every now and then we break out some craft gin for her and either Jack Daniels or Johnnie Walker Black for me.  We’re going to bed at an average of 3 AM catching up on Amazon Prime and Netflix series.

We play trivia through Zoom once a week.  We do it weird because my tower doesn’t have a camera and the speaker doesn’t work.  We start a call with my step-daughter and communicate with the group through her computer speakers.

The trivia game started as a benefit for employees of the bar where we used to play every Thursday.  Now we’ve moved on to supporting a community garden,an anti-racism group in Houston, and a food bank in India.

 

Cruising, food and drink, Software

A wasted month

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My wife left me and the cats alone on June 27.  She would be back from Europe on July 25.  I called it a month because it’s 28 days door to door.

She went to London, her favorite city and then on a Mediterranean cruise with he daughter.

This post has been ignored too long.  It was last touched in September of 2019.

The main thing I didn’t do was get my Windows 10 partition working again.  I’ve decided to take the money way out and buy another box and dedicate it to Windows.

Woot has a mini box for $200.  I bought a wireless adapter and a terabyte external drive to go along with it.  I already have a USB hub for the keyboard and the monitor.

I didn’t work on the blog because it didn’t come up on the rotation too often and I was recruited to work on my wife and stepdaughter’s trivia business.  I’m building up the question database.

I got the input part of it working they I want.  Searching and presenting the questions is kicking my ass.  The problem is cycling through the possible search boxes.  There isn’t a goto or end statement  in php.

I know I have to use if and else statements but that only solves the no goto  part of the problem.  Worse comes to worst I can use one page per search argument.

These are simple problems but God do it feel good when I get the correct output.

 

food and drink, Trivia

5 days of trivia ending with a cold

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In June of 2017  we went to Dallas to participate in event called Triviapalooza.

This event is where Buzztime players across the country to put faces behind the avatar pictures and handles.  This year we gathered in Arlington, a suburb of Dallas,  at a bar/restaurant called BoomerJacks near Cowboy stadium.

We flew into Love Field, the downtown airport.  Neither of us had been to the airport in at least 10 years for Brooke, probably 45 for me.  While most airports have turned into malls Love has turned into an airline museum.

There is room for that because only 3 airlines fly out of there now, Southwest, Delta, and Virgin America.  It used to be the hub for Braniff International Airlines.  It was a major player in the 60s and 70s.  My brother and I flew it a lot because my dad was a ticket agent.

We were living in Oklahoma City and we would always have to change planes in Dallas.  Back then the flights were on a massive analog board about 15 feet by 20 feet.  The info flipped into place like cards.

Nobody talks about a trip if everything went perfect.  It’s boring and they would be bragging about nothing.  We discovered that a screw had fallen out of my scooter.  This screw kept the seat from hitting the ground.  By the time we discovered this the Uber driver was gone.

We called the manufacturer to see if they could ship us a new one.  They could send us a seat assembly kit for around  $200.  This hit the customer rep as a bit excessive so she connected us with the maintenance department.  The girl gave us the specs for the screw.  We could get a bag of 2 for 3 bucks at the Home Depot that was in walking distance of the hotel.

If you clicked the BoomerJack’s link you might have noticed there are two in Arlington.  I didn’t think that Arlington was big enough to have to chain bar/restaurants that would accommodate a group of over 50 Buzztime trivia players.  I picked the wrong one.

One was near the University of Texas Arlington.  Their sports mascot is the Mavericks and their colors are close to the NBA team.  The one we wanted is VERY close to Texas Stadium.

This was interesting of Saturday because there was a major soccer game(USA vs Costa Rica) that night.  There all sorts of signs about no parking for the game but customers were coming into the bar to watch the game.

Now for the trivia action or inaction since basically we were all just sitting around eating, drinking, watching television and pressing buttons.  The competition for the top 20 spots on the local rankings was tight.  As I mentioned earlier there were around 50 players from across the nation.

A typical game is 15 questions worth 1000 points each with 4 possible answers.  Each game is 30 minutes long.  Every day a specially themed hour-long game is scheduled at 7:30 PM CST.   See  Buzztime‘s website  for what plays on what days.  Saturday is music trivia.

This music trivia game was going to concentrate on the boy band One Direction in the final 2 rounds.  Buzztime  had announced this but some players don’t check the website.  Others do and hit the Wikipedia.   I am in this group.

I was in the lead after 3 rounds.  No one was more surprised than I.  Luckily we had a One Direction fan from Houston.  She played under the handle BBB.  I followed her answers in the next two rounds and won the thing.

 

I’ve been working on this post off an on since June. To make a long post short I had a bad cold when we got home.

food and drink

New phone

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Tuesday our sick cat Mackenzie pissed on the top of our chest of drawers.  Unfortunately my phone was on the chest of drawers.  I took it apart and dried all the parts. There was no joy.

I had planned to replace it the next day but a thunderstorm rolled through town.  It’s not like I was going to miss any calls.  I get a phone call an average of every three days.

Brooke decided that night to join me to see if we could get a new plan.  That meant I had to wait for her.  It meant I had to pick a place for lunch and places to compare phones and plans.

We thought we’d try a new Greek deli.  We thought it was in the old Bennigan’s space.  That turned out to be a new sports bar with slow service and passable food.  An AT&T storefront was in the same strip center.

The death star guy didn’t want to talk to us if we weren’t buying a new smartphone.  We went to Best Buy and their guy was very helpful.  I got a free Samsung that was just like my LG.  Brooke got a new flip phone for $30.